An often overlooked sideeffect is that constitution looks less valuable.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It wouldn't affect blasters much more than it would affect martial damage-dealers, or healers for that matter.
The only people who would be just as effective (and harder to kill) would be those who rely on save-or-die effects.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As a GM I always run monster with max hp.
My parties tend to be stronger than the CR paradigm would normally account for, so I beef up all the enemies to make it what I feel is appropriately challenging.
Giving both players and monsters max hp...I dunno. I wouldn't do it. The players that is. After the first couple levels combat stops being so swingy anyways. It does make combat longer, in the sense that enemies actually get a round or two of actions before the players kill them. Of course, thats what I was after.
For me the cons you listed are actually benefits.
I'm only going to do max hit points for the players of my Magic Academy game since I've intentionally got a party of entirely arcane casters.
|
Max HP monsters will make combat take longer by a lot. It will reinforce DPs builds and make things like blasting less useful while applying tremendous strength to things like in combat poison.
Maximum HP for monsters encourages stronger player builds and will instantly put pressure on player resources and tend to do so more often as they gain levels and in a greater number of encounters.
This alone can all make for a tougher game. Adding max HP for players just sounds silly. This will favor defensive builds and make encounters drag out substantially. Certain expectations like wanting the party to flee due to being outmatched will be far less likely to happen as danger immediately becomes less obvious since max HP narrows down the list of effects that are going to threaten a player (save or dies) while increasing the cost just to demonstrate that the players 'are in for a dangerous ordeal (save or dies).
Max hp to both will radically change players, combat and probably trivialize many encounters.
My suggestion from someone who is currently playing in a campaign with max monster HD, randomly rolled loot that has us fabulously ahead of wbl (+6 con belt on our barb at 8-10th level), and a player or two who've managed to roll at close to max HP per HD for most levels (our barbarian and inquisitor and fighter)- drop the max Hp for your players. Encounters will take entirely too long at certain points. As you get higher level, you'll have to adjust the monster cr to compensate anyway, so why not keep things easier for yourself?
I'm in a game right now with Max HP, and combat is very fast. Damage in Pathfinder is really, really high. I've noticed practically no difference beyond the fact that, usually, the entire team gets two turns, rather than only the fastest getting to go twice.
|
I'm in a game right now with Max HP, and combat is very fast. Damage in Pathfinder is really, really high. I've noticed practically no difference beyond the fact that, usually, the entire team gets two turns, rather than only the fastest getting to go twice.
This has been my experience as well. I don't feel like it's too big of a deal on either end, our party still decimates even tougher encounters in under 3 rounds, usually 2 is all we need unless their is a mob of enemies.
As far as max player HP, in this particular campaign it hasn't seemed to really hurt anything. But we fight tougher monsters a lot, we ran up against a Young Red Dragon, who was intentionally played suboptimally, at level 6 and barely made it out alive.
I don't think it's necessary to give the Party Max hP though.
|
|
This makes little sense unless you are flinging a lot of save or die effects or if everyone is rather high level with optimized DPs capabilities straight out of the DPR Olympics. I say this because we have a barbarian who can crit for 70+ and most people hit for around 20 or more per attack (everyone is a two handed high strength, power attacking great sword user). And monsters still Take more than two rounds to drop and we hit often. Maybe you have more martial ranged characters than we do.arty composition plays an important part in combat length as well.
I say this because we have a barbarian who can crit for 70+ and most people hit for around 20 or more per attack (everyone is a two handed high strength, power attacking great sword user). And monsters still Take more than two rounds to drop and we hit often.
Without knowing your party level and what sort of thing you're fighting, that doesn't mean much.
Let's do some comparisons. A hasted level 6 Fighter with a greatsword might do 20 damage per hit, and attack three times a round, for average damage of 60 (less against high AC).
Say you've got two of those fighting a Young Blue Dragon (CR 9). The dragon has 96 HP so it could easily die in two full attacks even if the rest of the party doesn't do much to help.
Meanwhile the dragon can do 50ish damage in a full attack against low AC and 27 with a breath weapon. A level 6 fighter with 14 Con should normally have around 58 HP so if one of them is hit by a breath weapon then a full attack, he'll probably die.
The battle will last longer than two rounds with defensive tactics, or if it's several smaller enemies instead of one big one.
With the 'max HP' house rule, the dragon would have 150HP and the Fighter 78HP. The battle still wouldn't take very long, but it might last another round without anyone dying.
|
I find I tend to increase Monster HP, even if I don't max it I give them 3/4 of the max HP they should have.
I know that monsters can dish out the dmg too but it feels anticlimactic when something does in the first round without being able to attack.
I don't want to make everything attack my PCs in the surprise round because that just becomes boring.
This makes little sense unless you are flinging a lot of save or die effects or if everyone is rather high level with optimized DPs capabilities straight out of the DPR Olympics. I say this because we have a barbarian who can crit for 70+ and most people hit for around 20 or more per attack (everyone is a two handed high strength, power attacking great sword user). And monsters still Take more than two rounds to drop and we hit often. Maybe you have more martial ranged characters than we do.arty composition plays an important part in combat length as well.
Those damage numbers don't mean a lot out of the context of what level you are. Dealing 20 damage a hit is pretty routine, even fairly early. A Level 1 full BAB character with a Greatsword, 18 Str, and Power Attack is dealing 2d6+9 (16 average). By level 4, I'd expect that to be up to 20.
As far as my party is concerned, we are currently 5th level:
Hydrokineticist (me)
Blackbaded Hexcrafter (Strength) Magus
Barbarian with a Greatsword
Cleric of Brigh (focused on buffs/control and crafting)
Throwing Weapon Hunter with a Tiger
Just last session, we added two more characters, but fights were already over in short order before we became a party of 7:
Drunken Master of Many Styles Monk
Switch Hitting Fighter with a Greatsword and Longbow (I wish he had let me help him...)
We have three (now four, I suppose) strong damage dealers (me, the magus, and barbarian...now, I suppose the fighter in theory), but the cleric basically does no damage and the Hunter is both waiting for some key build pieces to make his personal output strong and unwilling to risk his pet's life, so, honestly, we don't have especially high DPR overall.
I find that numbers, tactics and terrain make a bigger impact in regards to monsters living any longer in combat. Fighting an aquatic creature underwater before Freedom of Movement and equivalents become available is a nightmare. At the same time the hardest fights against Dragons is when the party doesn't have any decent ranged weapons and the Dragon just strafes the party for a few rounds.
HP, AC and Saves don't make too much of a difference if all the monster does is charge into the Party 4(or more)-on-1. Unless that monster is outside the characters APL or has some ability that the party can't deal with, it will get punked in 2 rounds or less.
Max hp makes healing and direct damage LESS effective, thus making Save-or-Suck, and Save or Die effects MORE effective. It pushes the game into territory where to be effective, you must optimize into flachion Fred, or just play a caster.
Generally, this is the opposite effect most GM's want, especially as the game enters the mid to later levels.
I recommend keeping the starting ability scores of all PCs low. It is a little harder to warp the game when the wizard has a 17 Int and the Fighter has a 16 str.
To keep encounters from being too short, throw in more enemies, especially weak ones. It doesn't matter if the barbarian does 100hp per hit if the mooks only have 30hp. Also give the mooks some disposable items like tanglefoot bags, alchemist fire, and scrolls.
Finally, if you do want things to have more hp, consider giving monsters or PCs the toughness feat. It scales much more elegantly then max hp.
I always figured max hp on both sides would encourage save or suck/die strategies (which I dislike, it can make combat too swingy), but in hearing from people who've done this say it's had positive results I'm becoming more and more tempted to try it.
Anybody else have experience with this? Please, no theory crafting. Just the facts mam.
I always figured max hp on both sides would encourage save or suck/die strategies (which I dislike, it can make combat too swingy), but in hearing from people who've done this say it's had positive results I'm becoming more and more tempted to try it.
Anybody else have experience with this? Please, no theory crafting. Just the facts mam.
I'm both running a game and playing in a game (same group of players) where we use max HP for both PCs & NPCs. In neither game has anyone decided to build a SoS or SoD based character specifically to account for higher HP totals; players just build what they were interested in playing regardless.
The higher HP totals don't have a really noticeable effect on combat length; the number of combatants on each side, as usual, has a much greater impact on combat length.
|
|
For starters, my party is effectively tenth level. We actually do a bit more than 20 a hit but I don't really follow our DPs since things take forever to drop. Sure, if we keep getting off the fabled full attack between multiple two handed great sword using martials, the enemy has about 2.5 rounds before death after you factor in real hit and miss chances in an actual game instead of consistent statistical averages. I mean, our barbarian had a +18 to hit and missed 10 times in a row (we're counting his miss streaks, it's a point of amusement with the party).
My flame oracle actually deals the most damage per target, per round (minimum damage is approximately 30+ and average is 65+). But even that doesn't end encounters as fast as you'd think. Our dragons like to fly away from clumps of martial bad@$$es. They like to breath cones and lines on us first and to catch our casters in them. Some actually use things like sla's or actual spells to buff themselves so that the second iterative and the third aren't going to land every time a guy with a pointy stick full attacks. We have dedicated martial characters with high strength scores who miss on primary attacks and secondary attacks. People do roll low. Enemies do buff. Enemies do use terrain. When you increase enemy HP to maximum on top of those things, they live longer. Maybe in other peoples parties their martials always get off the full attack, and single attacks do awesome damage and nobody rolls much variety on the d20 and everything works out statistically even per fight. But in all games I have run and have played in, that has never been the case and dealing with a monster who we just barely beat normally who suddenly 'oh yeah, he's got 20-80 extra HP' is like.....crap.
The math still works out that it takes longer to kill an enemy with more HP than one with less. You can try arguing it other ways in an attempt to invalidate or undermine the value of increasing HP, but I think that enters narrow focus builds, optimization builds, or ignores that not every party has 1-2 high strength power attackers with greatsword s and then extra offensive stuff. Not everyone uses strength for melee or a two handed weapon or even power attack. When you factor in the variety of melee builds or parties with no ranged or limited ranged options (ours), the effect of increased HP on enemies is very much obvious. It is noticeable from second level on. Fights are longer unless you focus on save or die-type effects. Also, PC's must work harder to stay alive and burn through more resources. I enjoy this.
I have not experienced legit max HP for players. Illegitimately, we have a couple who always roll max or close to it. What has it done? They fight on much longer than normal. Encounters where they should have honestly home KO or died they are still standing and fighting and waiting for heals. The added pc health and longer fights from added enemy health means healing gets drained pretty rapidly as there are just a lot more HP to heal between our two guys who have so many. Our inquisitor hit level 8 or 9 recently and has around 90 HP. My oracle is level 10 with just barely 80 and that's due to a very high con and taking the average every single level. My oracle has dropped a few times due to failed saves and raw damage but in general, he was able to eat more damage than anyone else in the party for a while due to his good HP and his perennially active defending bone. But with the inquisitor at 90 and the barbarian at something higher than that before raging, and both having respectable ac and such, they tank...they tank very hard. The gm has slowly had ever greater difficulty in dropping these characters. Encounters ultimately end up being slugfests of a sort as our martials have plenty of time to circumvent whatever the obstacle is to us dealing gobs of damage to the threats. Either they wait for us casters to resolve it or they climb, use their magic items to go gaseous or whatever it takes to get them to the target....then the long multiround beatfest begins-for both sides.
This is in stark difference from our old primary tank who used mostly copious amounts of ac and decent HP but not near maxed hp. The result was that encounters lasted as long as his ac was working. After a few too many hits the healing would come in and we would determine if the fight was one we could win or wanted to try and win. See, due to having HP that could be depleted reasonably and enemies having HP that couldn't be depleted as reasonably, we spent many fights making judgment calls about if we should run or not. We were forced into attempting tactical plays and 'going for broke' or even leaving it at every man for himself (we got pretty handily owned by 3 Xills, I think). Since we switched to the guys who have been rolling near max HP every level and boosted their ac to decent or better, that sort of stuff has gone out the window.
Max HP on both sides will lead to slugfest 2015 or the most efficient forms of encounter resolution....or lazy fights because players have a huge buffer before death so combat becomes more casual.
That's my 2 platinum.
The higher HP totals don't have a really noticeable effect on combat length; the number of combatants on each side, as usual, has a much greater impact on combat length.
I should clarify what I said here. In real time, the fights don't take noticeably longer. In terms of combat rounds they certainly do. My group sees the greater number of combat rounds as a benefit, since it makes in-combat buffing more viable. For example, in the RotRl game I'm playing in my character is a cleric/holy vindicator. Because many combats take 7+ (although the long combats are more due to large numbers of enemies) rounds, I commonly cast Divine Power. If combats only lasted 2-3 rounds, I'd never cast the spell because it would be inefficient. The long combats also make the Holy Vindicator a more viable class because it doesn't gain action economy efficiency with one of its main abilities (stigmata) until 6th level.
I have played a couple of campaigns under this rule and an even worse variant. I and everyone else hated it and it was awful. The martial characters ignored AC entirely in favor of offense. Like in their starting armor but all with +5 weapons and not much else. Because when your job is to kill them before they kill you and it is really hard to drop anything you get crazy feelings of inadequacy. The casters only used save or lose and used it all day every day twice per round from level 9 onwards, because targeting HP under these conditions is a chumps game. It made the fights swingier and faster since none of the characters had any defenses.
In one campaign it annoyed the GM enough that he started making things happen against the rules by fiat, and then his players quit. In the other we were ready for it and it went better, but still the rules changes had the opposite of the intended effect.
The problem with this change is that rather than having a talk about whether everyone is having fun, one person (the GM) is trying to take away power from one or more other people (the players who kill too effectively) without being straightforward about it. If you aren't enjoying the combat portion of the game it helps much more to talk about it than to try and tweak the rules to make people less effective. And it backfires in my experience if you don't explain the actual problem, because players who made an effective character under one ruleset are pretty likely to do the same under another.
Now how about when you have a large party (7-8 PC's)? Will max HP for enemies still favor SoL/SoD then, and devalue healing and blasting? I am talking max hp enemies, not PC's.
I have played a couple of campaigns under this rule and an even worse variant.
What was the variant?
I have played a couple of campaigns under this rule and an even worse variant.What was the variant?
PCs have max HP, Monsters/NPCs have TRIPLE maximum HP. The GM we quit on used this and when 200 damage failed to down a Hill Giant we figured out something was very wrong. Either they had triple max HP or they had enough class levels to be TPK territory. We asked, he answered and nobody was happy.
PCs have max HP, Monsters/NPCs have TRIPLE maximum HP. The GM we quit on used this and when 200 damage failed to down a Hill Giant we figured out something was very wrong. Either they had triple max HP or they had enough class levels to be TPK territory. We asked, he answered and nobody was happy.I have played a couple of campaigns under this rule and an even worse variant.What was the variant?
Ouch, triple max hp for NPCs seems pretty crazy. I can see how that would be very frustrating.
|
our slayer has AC 50 and doles out 1000+ damage per round of full attack. So nothing of her "appropriate" CR can hit her and she could pretty much solo even a super boss creature. My monsters usually NEED 3x max HP just so that other people can get a swing in, and even so they're usually down by 2-3 rounds of combat.
our slayer has AC 50 and doles out 1000+ damage per round of full attack.
You know this begs the question of how your slayer is reaching those numbers. What's her level & build? (I think I saw you mention in another thread that your players are way above recommended WBL?)
our slayer has AC 50 and doles out 1000+ damage per round of full attack. So nothing of her "appropriate" CR can hit her and she could pretty much solo even a super boss creature. My monsters usually NEED 3x max HP just so that other people can get a swing in, and even so they're usually down by 2-3 rounds of combat.
The problem is that one character is much stronger than the others. Either everyone needs a high op god character or nobody does. It sounds like the power differential is the problem rather than the opponents stats.
The problem is that one character is much stronger than the others. Either everyone needs a high op god character or nobody does. It sounds like the power differential is the problem rather than the opponents stats.
Totally agree with this; I'm just curious about the character's build. I knew slayer could be strong, but I didn't think it could be that strong.
|
|
1k DPR and 50 ac is silly. This breaks the normal expectations of the game and breaks above normal expectations also. As said above, this is a character power issue more than anything else.
At any rate, more enemies make fights last a lot longer. We fought 6-7 giants and that just took forever. It was our only encounter and the casters went through plenty of their spells. Most of our combats run at least 7 rounds and have since we started this campaign. As we get higher level, decision making is becoming harder because enemies don't drop quickly enough. So combats take more time in real time as well. This is likely to change once our casters reach 11 (currently I have the only one close at 10th level and half way to 11).
Each additional player is a HP reduction to all the monsters. Simply put players are dealing both more damage and more actions. There is a balance to be had in max HP enemies and party size and party composition.
Our group is allowed to have two characters at a time but can only play one per scenario for purposes of exp and combat, but we can switch to our alts for story purposes. We have a group of four at the moment. The core group is a high ac decent HP fighter tank with the unbreakable archetype. We have a gnome pyromaniac flame oracle child (me) as our ranged DPR and backup/secondary healer/buffer (glorious heat), we have a healing domain cleric who just started to be able to hit stuff in combat, and we have an inquisitor who was a secondary martial DPs character. This group did quite well and often used tactics to abuse the flame oracles heavy damage to speed up encounters. But some fights were just beyond us (3 Xills).
The alt group is my winter witch (lowest level player), an arcanist, a druid with an ape that grapples, and a barbarian. We usually pair the barbarian with the inquisitor and crank our DPr higher. If we ran the inquisitor and my oracle, combats would go quickly. We'd simply do too much damage, too fast. But with just two of the DPR characters, it's not enough. We slug through encounters. Anything with flight or range or on a hard to reach area makes things worse. We have answers, of course, but it's still slow and rough. My witches familiar spider climbs the martials so they can reach enemies, the druid often wildshapes into a giant eagle and even attacks. My witch can fly and mitigate non-melee enemies relevance for a while in hopes that our martials can get the ground foes cleaned up. The arcanist has ranged spells for damage. But the max HP means we rely on our martials a lot to actually finish things.
If we had some bow users sitting back in safety full attacking while our casters dropped slowing fog spells and tentacles that our archers could shoot through, combats would be pretty fast and probably unexciting until the gm adjusted for such tactics.
Numbers and composition totally matter.
I want the slayer build... level and gear.
Another thing this houserule does is reduce the impact of pounce-type abilities. When everything has max hit points, there are more rounds where a melee martial can stand still and full-attack because it takes longer for things to die.
|
|
It is a mythic game, and everyone has extra feats and the like.
Party is now level 21 and tier 8. Feats are story rewards and picked by me.
Slayer is dual wielding brilliant energy wakisashies. Has weapon fineness and mythic of it. Has improved crit and mythic of it. Has mythic path ability that doubles precision a crit. Has the ability to use greater invibility.
No one else in the party is damage specced. But our bard has more than 50 on intimidate checks. Our alch is smarter than a demin lord and with one rank in each knowledge knows everything there is to know about everything.
Our warpriest can grapple anything that isn't grapple based.
So the party is all very powerful at what they do. It's just the slayer has the best initiative so goes first. She's overshadowed by the NPC barbarian that one of my roomies plays when she's up to playing.
It is a very epic type game. And to stop things from being too easy I have to boost hp.